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A snoot is a device that sits in front of a speedlight or strobe and constrains the light to a very specific area.

One of the articles I’ve seen floating around the ‘net a few times is how to make a snoot from a cereal box and some black straws. Click here for the original article.

You can probably spend $$$ on a properly built fancy-pants snoot, but to have a basic fiddle with the idea a bit of cardboard and some straws seemed like a good idea.

I’ve been keeping half an eye open for a packet of black straws and found some at Spotlight last weekend. I hacked apart a cereal box and kind of broadly followed the directions they had. Very easy stuff.

It adds a very interesting element to the flash. The light is so incredibly directional. It’s almost like a vignette, but not from the lens: it’s due to the flash being delivered over a very short area in front of the camera.

It’s a strange mixture of warmer light while having much sharper shadows. We still need to do some experimentation to get the hang of using one, but it’s a very cheap (like, $2.00) accessory that adds a real twist to the sorts of shots you can capture.

Bouncing the flash with the snoot doesn’t seem to work nearly as well as it does without the snoot because the light is so directional so you don’t get the softness normally associated with a bounce.

EDIT: Here’s another DIY snoot article that’s even simpler.

Every year, on the 25th of April, Australia and New Zealand celebrate ANZAC Day. It’s a day to remember and commemorate those who fought at Gallipoli during the First World War.

We choose this day to remember because it marks the day the Gallipoli Campaign began — April 25, 1915. Over the years, veterans of other conflicts have joined the ANZAC Day parade: those who fought in World War II, Korea, Vietnam and recent conflicts including Iraq, Afghanistan and Timor.

On ANZAC Day, ceremonies are held in all major cities and most country towns. If you drive through a country town of any size you will find a statue or monument of some sort in a public place that on this day becomes the focal point of the community.

In Maryborough, where we live, it’s McLandress Square, which sits right out front of the post office. It’s a fairly small grassy area that is dominated by a statue that reminds us of those who gave their lives fighting for our country.

A small white cross is placed around the statue for each and every boy or young man who didn’t return home. The Girl Guides spent a few nights over the last week making poppies for the crosses.

Later this morning there will be a military guard of honour, a few speeches, and a chance for those of us who enjoy the freedoms we have today to remember those who fell and thank those who were fortunate enough to return.

It’s not hard at all to find lots of names you recognise amongst the crosses. Small country towns tend to have the same name appear over and over as generations of the same family hand down farms and businesses to sons and daughters.

There’s a very real connection between these small symbolic crosses and the people who walk the streets of the town today.

The Victorian Police recently launched a new news website; Simon Overland has been pushing it around the ‘net.

Of much more interest, however, is that they’re now using twitter to publish information about newsworthy events they’re involved in. It’s early days, and they still haven’t really leveraged it. Their contact page, for example, is olde worlde – a phone number and an email address.

Although my working life revolves around technology I refrain from posting almost anything about the IT industry on this blog. Mostly.

This warrants an exception.

Oracle is buying Sun Microsystems.

They’ve acquired three major chunks of technology by doing this – Sun’s hardware (very nice, but very $$$), Solaris (very, very nice and $0.00) and Java (kind of nice and $0.00).

Under the leadership of Jonathon Schwartz, Sun has pushed to open source software and make money in support and hardware. It will be interesting to see if this trend is reversed. Oracle don’t historically have a strong open source involvement; certainly nothing like the involvement Sun have had. For the last few years you’ve been able to download Solaris x86 and Java (with Eclipse as an IDE) to build a really solid development environment on commodity PC hardware for next to nothing. This doesn’t match Oracle’s business model at all.

The takeover is a good fit from the perspective that Sun has long been the blessed hardware and OS platform for big Oracle installations, but is that enough?

Another point of interest as noted by @Scobleizer is that Oracle now owns MySql. Will this morph into an Oracle Lite or be spun off into a separate company?

Interesting times.

There’s a series showing in the US at the moment called When we left Earth. It’s all about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. Great stuff, made even greater because lots of the original crew and mission controllers (Gene Kranz, Gene Cernan, Chris Kraft, etc) are interviewed and discuss the details of what went on. Fantastic stuff. I can’t get enough of Apollo documentaries. Mankind’s greatest achievement, without any doubt whatsoever. The Saturn V rockets used in the Apollo programme are still the most powerful machine anyone has ever constructed.

If you share my love of this stuff, you have to check out the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. It’s an incredibly detailed resource providing transcripts of all communications between the spacecraft and mission control, many of the transcripts with annotations by astronauts and mission control staff. Here’s an example.

I still get a lump in my throat when I read the CDR (commander) notes at 112:45 on this page.

Oh, and I still laugh my ass off at The Onion’s take on it. Lots of NSFW language, but really funny.

The devastating earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1906 occurred on this day, 103 years ago – April 18th.

My grandmother once told me (Mum, can you confirm?) that one of her cousins emigrated from Germany to the USA – and in particular, San Francisco. Several months later this earthquake hit, and Grandma’s family never heard from the cousin again.

Some photographs of the era survive:

On 18 April 1906, the morning of the great San Francisco earthquake, [Arnold] Genthe, with his cameras and studio destroyed, borrowed a hand-held camera and photographed the destruction across the city. Of his over 180 surviving, sharp-focus photographs of San Francisco, probably his most famous image is "San Francisco, April 18th, 1906," which shows a view from Nob Hill, down Sacramento Street. Enormous clouds of smoke ominously approach, buildings’ facades have collapsed from the quake, and residents stand and sit in the street, in a stupor, calming watching the approaching fire. [Link]

Yes please.

Once Wikipedia hit the ‘net, the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica never stood a chance.

Case in point: qualifying for the 2009 Chinese Grand Prix finished was barely 4 hours ago, and the wikipedia entry for Sebastian Vettel has already been update to note that he took Red Bull Racing’s first ever pole position. (I know that, because I went to update the page myself, but it had already been done.)

With that kind of turnaround, dead tree publications that cost $,$$$ and are 18 months behind the action are instantly worthless.

The wikipedia entry on the Britannica (love the irony) notes its publication date is “1768-present”. I suspect that will be amended to “1768-201x” in the not too distant future. Its days are surely numbered.

You can access the Britannica online, of course. It’s free for 3 minutes, then AU$69.95 per year. No thanks.

Tuna will be wiped out by 2012 unless overfishing is stopped, environmental groups have warned. [Link]

About 18 hours to go, give or take. Then twitter explodes.